The post-Olympic year is the time for the up-and-coming sailors to make hay while last year's Olympic medallists are opening supermarkets and cashing in on the after-dinner speech circuit. Traditionally the year after the Games is a ‘soft' year, although probably not as soft as it used to be, now that the circuit has become so professional...
"Looking at the heinous forecast, under normal circumstances there would have been no way that I would have bothered to get out of bed that Saturday morning. With sub-zero temperatures, and a wind chill from a strong northerly breeze threatening to make a freezing day feel Arctic, the prospect of competing in the Bloody Mary was not my idea of fun...." Andy Rice reports from a shattering experience competing in a Devoti D-1 at the Bloody Mary....
With sub-zero temperatures, bone-chilling winds gusting over 25 knots, just 61 entrants and 29 finishers, this year's Bloody Mary must go down as one of the toughest in its 37 year history. This classic pursuit race throws up many different kinds of winners, and this year it was the turn of a 505, immaculately sailed by Staunton Harold's Andy Smith and Tim Needham, to lift the coveted trophy.
In the first Sailing Talk podcast of 2010, Justin and Andy already have a lot of sailing to catch up on, including the 49er and International 14 Worlds, as well as the latest on America's Cup shenanigans between Alinghi and BMW Oracle Racing....
The basic facts on this brand new series:
SailJuice gets an exclusive interview with Mike Drummond, design coordinator of BMW Oracle Racing, the day after the extraordinary 190-foot wing rig goes for its first test sail on the DogZilla trimaran. Mike is talking straight from the boat, and shares his views on the benefits of solid-rig technology and his first impressions of this feat of modern engineering....
Disaster as BMW Oracle's 60-metre mast came tumbling down while training off San Diego. It would have been a $10 million catastrophe for almost any other team. But such is the size and scale of Larry Ellison's operation, the American team carried on as if it was business as usual....
Audio (6 minutes) and text interview: Olympic Champion Anna Tunnicliffe talks through her tuning tips for the Laser Radial, and how she adjusts the rig through the wind range. "The vang in the Laser has a big influence in your sail setup, so just really pay attention to what the vang is doing for you. In the big breeze, we see people not pulling on their vangs enough, and in the light air people don't use their vang enough..."
Peter Lester has just completed two weeks of radio commentary at the Louis Vuitton Cup in Nice. A great sailor in his own right, Lester tells Sailing Talk why he thinks Azzurra won, and why politics shouldn't get in the way of great sailing events taking place...
Azzurra strategist Tom Burnham looks back at a classic - and controversial - day's match racing at the Louis Vuitton Trophy in Nice. We also ask Tom to offer his views on the controversial Thierry Henry hand-ball incident in the recent World Cup qualifier against Ireland in the football.
Mike Sanderson tells Sailing Talk why he thinks Team Origin has something pretty unique and special with the unbreakable bond of friendship that exists in the afterguard between Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson....
The dynamic duo of Sailing Talk, Justin and Andy, meet up in Nice at the 2009 Louis Vuitton Trophy to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the eight teams, and ask why a series can't be a series, or a circuit, or a number of other words in the thesaurus...